Clinging to the past

Only ‘teenagers, bloggers, marketers, recruiters, evangelists, self-proclaimed evangelists and sales people (ahem, excuse me – business development professionals)’ use social networking sites. Not lawyers. And of those few lawyers who join, almost none are corporate counsel.

That’s the word from John Lipsey, LexisNexis VP Corporate Counsel Services, at the Martindale-Hubbell blog.

Strange position to take when:

• There’s 119,000 LinkedIn profiles from those within the ‘law practice’ industry per a Google search across the LinkedIn directory.
• A quick search for ‘General Counsel” at LinkedIn draws the maximum of 500 search results. There’s certainly many more.
• Like Doug Cornelius, who also found Martindale’s position curious, I am seeing an explosion of lawyers adding profiles at LinkedIn.
• Legal OnRamp, a social networking site for lawyers in private practice and in-house started by Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler, has in its short history more than 175 companies signed up, including several leading U.S. banks and a clutch of major corporates.
• DLA Piper, the largest law firm in the country is using a Facebook-style networking tool for its trainees.
• Mike Dillon, General Counsel at Sun Microsystems and Executive Vice President of the company’s legal department, finds wikis, social networking, mash-ups, virtual communities and blogs incredibly rich and powerful when it comes to knowledge sharing and communication.

I’ll concede that most lawyers have not figured out how to effectively leverage social networking sites. Like the use of Google, Amazon, and other Internet services that no one was clamoring for but which we now could not live without, it’ll take time.

Despite Lipsey’s ‘talking to a couple hundred corporate counsel,’ the train is leaving the station on this one, we’re not going back.